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Saturday, 26 February 2011

M D Nalapat

While
politicians in India often talk about the prevalence of the “black” (
ie illegal) economy in India, especially when they are in opposition and
not accessing the vast funds they used to get while in power, the
reality is that the root of “black money” in India is politics. While a
Mahatma Gandhi was able to persuade tens of millions of Indians to
sacrifice their jobs and their fortunes to follow him in his numerous
jabs against British rule,since the 1970s, those in politics expect to
get compensated for their efforts,and the higher the loot,the more the
rush to get on board a particular bandwagon. In urban areas,unless at
least Rs 500 is paid to an individual, she or he will refuse to attend a
political rally. A few months ago, two politicians in Maharashtra were
discussing before an open microphone the high cost of arranging crowds
to cheer Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Huge sums were mentioned in
this connection,it being a given that a Sonia rally has to have tens of
thousands of attendees, so that television cameras could pan the throng
and give testimony to the immense popularity of the current owner of the
Congress Party. That the crowds shown on television are usually
expressionless - if not openly bored and fidgety - seldom gets mentioned
in the media, which hungers for the access only favourable coverage
assures.

Saturday, 19 February 2011

M D Nalapat

The
Ides of March proved fatal to Gaius Julius Ceasar more than two
thousand years ago, when he was felled by a large group of conspirators
in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. Several of those that stabbed him were
his closest friends, people who may have been expected to defend rather
than to murder him. These days, within Delhi and Mumbai, a similar
group of conspirators has been active over the past eleven months,
seeking to take away not his life but his job from Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh. And as in the case of Ceasar, many of those scripting
his downfall are from his own party, and claim to be his ardent backers,
often going before television cameras to “damn him with faint praise”.

Deja
vu! A quarter-century ago, many of the same group that are nowadays
active against Manmohan Singh were expending considerable effort on
unseating his mentor, then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. The
Congress Party’s second non-Nehru Prime Minister (after the short-lived
1964-66 tenure of Lal Bahadur Shastri had incurred the anger of
loyalists of the family that owned the party, by his refusal to step
down after two years in office and hand over charge to a faithful
retainer, Kunwar (Prince) Arjun Singh, who had been Chief Minister of
Madhya Pradesh when the Bhopal disaster took place, and who made
arrangements for the safe escape of Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson
from Bhopal. Despite the fact that it was on his watch that the world’s
biggest industrial disaster took place, his 100% loyalty to the Nehru
family ensured that Arjun Singh was given his fill of important jobs,
ranging from chief ministership to Union Cabinet status and also
Governor of important states.

Saturday, 12 February 2011

M D Nalapat

After
nearly three decades of faithfully serving the interests of the NATO
powers, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak may have been forgiven for
believing that the alliance would stand by him in his moment of mortal
peril. Most of the huge assets that he has accumulated over the years
(perhaps by thriftily saving his salary) are in Egypt, and while his
immediate family have the means to run away from the country over which
they have ruled for so long, the bulk of his friends and relatives will
be left behind, to face the anger of the populace. And seeing the speed
with which the NATO powers have distanced themselves from him and the
system that Mubarak and they jointly created and administered for their
mutual benefit, it may not be long before the 83-year old gets arraigned
for human rights violations and be made to face trial in the
International Court. He would not be the first Third World leader to be
thus thrown to the wolves by those who are clear that only their
interest matters, and not that of the rest of the world, in any
situation. Indeed, the NATO powers consider themselves to be the world,
or the “international community”, as CNN or BBC calls them.

Amazingly,
none of these or other news channels has identified the small group of
individuals who are directly responsible for much of the unrest sweeping
across Egypt. While CNN,BBC and even Al Jazeera ( whose newsrooms are
filled with personnel from the NATO powers, as indeed are the key
positions in almost all countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council) focus
mainly on educated, “sophisticated” voices that clamour for “freedom
and democracy”, the reality is that it is economic hardship that has
brought hundreds of thousands of ordinary Egyptians to Tahrir Square.
Much of this pain has been caused by the huge increase in food prices
across the world.

If one were to rely on BBC or CNN for
information, you would be told that the high prices have been caused by
“supply disruptions”, which i turn has been caused ( or so we are told)
by “freak weather conditions”. Indeed, there have been floods and
storms. But this has been the case for centuries, if not millenia. The
reality is that more than 80% of the rise in price has been caused by
Speculation. The same small, super-greedy band of international
speculators who almost destroyed the world’s finances by their greed in
2008,are back in action, this time cornering foodstuffs so as to send
prices skyrocketing.

Those bankers and others who fund such
ghouls are the ones who need to be haule into prison for “human rights
abuses”. Instead, they are given not just honour and respect by
President Obama of the US and Prime Minister David Cameron of the UK,
but more than $1 trillion in subsidy, to rescue them from the economic
consequences of their own crimes. Those who preach “transparency” and
“accountability” to the world are silent when it comes to their own
deliberate failure in bringing to justice the handful of those who stole
more than $3 trillion from investors worldwide. Indeed, in the US, the
new Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, is as much a handmaiden of
speculators as was his predecessor, Hank Paulson.

Although
President Nicholas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany have called for changes in the laws so as to curb the
speculation and profiteering that caused the 2008 financial collapse,
this needed corrective has been opposed by President Obama and Prime
Minister Cameron, who seem to value the private interests of a handful
of super-greedy individuals more than they do the interests of the
global community. Fed by huge taxpayer-funded subsidies, the dozen-odd
financial conglomerates that were responsible for the 2008 meltdown are
again at work, once again sending the prices of oil, copper, foodstuffs
and other items shooting up. This they do by manipulating market prices,
free of any fear of adverse consequences, given the servility that
countries such as the US and the UK have shown to them since the era of
Reagan-Thatcher in the 1980s. Under Reagan-Thatcher, the making of money
in any way possible was glorified, hence the boom in the financial
industry since that period. While in the case of China under Deng
Xiaoping, money was made by increasing production and employment, in the
case of the US and the UK, money was made out of holding back
production, downsizing or destroying enterprises and dizzy speculation.
Such greed reached its high point during the George W Bush period, when a
company that was close to Vice-President Dick Cheney became the largest
corporate beneficiary of the Iraq war Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan,
Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Tony Blair. Since their time, speculators
have become the kingpins in the world financial system. Not content with
sending up the price of oil, they have focussed on Poor Country Debt
(draining hundreds of millions of dollars from very poor with the help
of certain NATO countries) and the staples of consumption of the poor.
Because of the price increases in petroproducts that are
speculator-driven, growth has slowed down in China and India, and as a
consequence, hundreds of millions have suffered in just these two
countries.

Because of the speculative rise in food prices,
several billion people have suffered, while many have even died of
starvation caused by higher food prices. Tens of millions more
(including many in the NATO countries that are the home of the
Super-Speculators) have lost their jobs because of the financial and
economic dislocation caused by the uncontrolled speculation that is
cheered on by both the US as well as the UK authorities.

It suits
the Super Speculators to pretend that the problems in Egypt are caused
by the “thirst for democracy” of the people there. The reality is that
it is the thirst for food and for jobs that have driven more than 95% of
the protestors towards the daily marches and rallies that are taking
place in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. Why there are no prorestors
in the UAE or in Kuwait is because the governments there have provided
food and jobs to the local people, thereby ensuring stability. However,
even they may face problems, if uncontrolled speculation continues in
items of mass relevance (such as petroproducts) or consumption (such as
foodgrains). Once again, the crimes of the few will lead to misery for
the many.

China, India and other emerging powers need to raise a
collective voice agains the Super Speculators. They need to shame the US
and the UK into enacting laws that criminalize the efforts at
withdrawing supplies from the market in order to boost prices, and that
make punishable the cornering of commodities by intermediaries intent
ony on fianancial windfalls. Hosni Mubarak is of a different cut from
Gamal Abdel Nasser, who lived a simple life and never allowed his family
to make money. Unlike Mubarak, who follows Thatcher and Cheney in
looking after only the interests of the super rich, Nasser cared for the
poor. It is ironical that it is the same super rich who have felled
Mubarak with their speculative ravaging of commodity markets.

Should
the US and the UK continue to permit speculators to push up the prices
of essential commodities, the world will witness such turmoil that the
core interests of even the US and the UK would be affected. Presumably,
the Super Speculators will not care, so long as they themselves are
safe. Greed has become King.

Saturday, 5 February 2011

M D Nalapat

Banks
that will not lend to companies even at very high rates of interest,
because bank officers are wary of being questioned by the police about
such loans. Multiple tax raids across the country on those not having
VVIP protection, most of which end up getting compounded after the
payment of bribes to the officers concerned. A mushrooming of
regulations in each field of economic activity, so that the avenues for
corruption get increased. Extreme incompetence on the part of
governmental agencies, often deliberate. Targeted speculation in food
grains and vegetables, that send retail prices shooting up while denying
the farmer any benefit from such increases. A handful of big business
interests who have free access to VVIPs and who can get appointed their
agents to ministerships and to senior administrative appointments. This
is the India of 2011,a country that must be bringing tears to the eyes
of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is facing sabotage within his own
team, designed to make him unviable as in his present job.

Weeks
ago, the mountain of speculaion about a thoroughgoing reshuffle of the
Union Cabinet produced a mouse. The corrupt were rewarded rather than
dropped. To take the example of Vilasrao Deshmukh, during whose tenure
as Chief Minister of Maharashtra more than 30,000 farmers committed
suicide. Despite the severe strictures passed on him by the Supreme
Court, which pointed out that he favoured moneylenders rather than
farmers, the Prime Minister was forced by the leadership of the Congress
Party to give Deshmukh the portfolio that controls the administration
of rural India, presumably so that he can make a dent in the population
explosion by presiding over mass suicides of farmers, this time on an
all-India scale. Of course, it is no secret that Deshmukh has been one
of the most generous contributors to the financial kitty of the Congress
Party. Friends in Mumbai often talked about huge suitcases filled with “
mangoes” that would be sent every few days from Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur
to Delhi by chartered flights, so as to keep Deshmukh’s chair safe
despite his having made Maharashtra one of the worst-administered states
in the Indian Union.

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About Prof. MD Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal University, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MDNalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.